Ancient Jewish Communities of the Diaspora
When the Jews were allowed to return to their homeland in 539 BCE by the decree of the Persian king Cyrus, many Jews opted to remain in exile rather than face an uncertain future in the newly Persian-controlled province of Yehud. Two centuries later, in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquest of the Near East, several important Jewish diasporic centers emerged. These can be traced in large part to Jewish soldiers or war captives being relocated to cities within Alexander’s empire and slowly establishing roots in those locations. Increasing commercial activity in such places would likely have drawn additional Jewish settlers. The Second Temple period, therefore, gave rise to the Jews becoming a predominantly diaspora population, with deep roots in several locations extending eventually from Babylonia to Rome.
Given the marked Jewish presence in several Mediterranean provinces of imperial Greece and Rome, recent scholarship has attempted to correct earlier perceptions of the Jewish diaspora as either an inferior outlier to a more traditional rabbinic Judaism centered in Palestine or Babylonia or a mere launching point for the supposedly more successful growth of late ancient Christianity. As the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo rightly observed, while the Jews viewed Jerusalem as their “mother city,” they still considered their diasporic homes to be their “fatherland” (patrios). Perhaps Philo meant in more practical terms that Jews could retain the notion of a spiritual homeland while also believing their resident city was their immediate home, to which they maintained patriotic allegiance.
The majority of Jews in the late Second Temple period did not reside in Judea and had little or no exposure to sectarian lifestyles. Nevertheless, there were also distinctive groups of Jews living outside Judea that may be considered sectarian. One, which Philo of Alexandria calls the Therapeutae, was a group of celibate Jewish men and women who retreated into the wilderness to immerse themselves in study, coming together only on the Sabbath. According to Philo, there were groups of Therapeutae in many places, but they were primarily located in Egypt, especially around Alexandria. Although Philo does not use the word hairesis to describe the Therapeutae, he links them to the Essenes in the introduction to his description of their practices. There were also Christian communities in the diaspora, with which Paul corresponded, in addition to the Christians in Judea. Besides the Therapeutae and the early Pauline churches, we know of no Jews in the Greco-Roman diaspora who lived in communities that would fit scholars’ definitions of a sect, with the possible exception of the rabbinic communities in the eastern lands of Persia.
[h2]The Jews of Asia Minor and Italy[/h2]
Almost everything we know about Jews in Asia Minor and Italy comes from inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of which are funerary. Until the very end of antiquity, almost all such texts are either in Greek (Asia) or in Greek or Latin (Italy). Almost none are in Hebrew or Aramaic. Some of the texts attest to normative types of communal organization. For example, in fourth-century Rome, Jews were often buried in exclusively Jewish catacombs, and the epitaphs disproportionately commemorate communal officials: archisynagogoi (heads of synagogues/communities), archontes (rulers), grammateis (scribes/secretaries), pateres and meteres tes synagoges (fathers and mothers of the synagogues/community), and so on. These titles did not remain part of the Jewish lexicon in the medieval and modern periods, but in antiquity, they were distinctively Jewish.
No fewer than eleven synagogues—either buildings or communal organizations which may or may not have possessed a specific building to pray in—are attested in late imperial Rome. We can say very little about the content of Roman Jewish communal life—there is no sign of a rabbi, even—yet the very fact of its firm establishment is of great interest.
The evidence from Asia Minor points to less familiar forms of organization, especially before the sixth century, when the standardized community seems to have become more common. Some peculiar features are worth noting: in several cities the only trace of Jewish corporate organization takes the form of rows of seats reserved for the Jews in the local theater (attendance at which the rabbis of course prohibited). In other places, Jewish corporate existence may have been expressed through institutions like trade guilds. Most remarkable is a long Greek epitaph from Hierapolis, Phrygia, in the third century CE, in which the decedent leaves an endowment to the local textile workers’ guild with instructions to have feasts and to crown his grave on Passover, Shavuot, and the Kalends of January each year.
Probably the most famous Jewish inscription from Asia Minor was discovered in the 1980s at Aphrodisias, Caria, in southwestern Turkey. It is commonly known as “the God-fearers’ inscription.” This text—actually two separate but related texts—commemorates donations by two separate groups, Jews and “God-fearers,” to apparently Jewish but otherwise unattested institutions. One seems to be a burial society, the other may be called patella, and its meaning and function remain a matter of controversy. “God-fearers” are attested elsewhere, especially in Asia—at Aphrodisias, some of them were very distinguished citizens—but their precise identity is uncertain. The possibilities range from people who were fundamentally members of the Jewish community but had not yet taken the step of formally converting, to conventional pagans who, out of generalized piety, or because of social or economic ties to Jews, made donations to Jewish communal institutions and so could be said by Jews to have revered (“feared”) their God. Also curious is an inscription from second-century Smyrna listing a donation for a set of public construction projects made by “the former Jews.” Why and how “former Jews” continued to constitute a group has long baffled scholars.